[HN Gopher] Brendan at Intel.com
___________________________________________________________________
Brendan at Intel.com
Author : ABS
Score : 306 points
Date : 2022-05-02 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brendangregg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brendangregg.com)
| bluedino wrote:
| https://www.brendangregg.com/Images/brendan_clones2006.jpg
|
| Is this some sort of training/demo room?
| stargrave wrote:
| More clones:
| https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2006-01-12/brendan-clones....
| brendangregg wrote:
| Thanks, I forgot where that one was.
| brendangregg wrote:
| Yes, a Sun Microsystems training room in Sydney. The entire
| building is now gone. I was teaching sysadmin and performance
| classes there in the early 2000s, for both internal and
| external staff.
| titzer wrote:
| Good luck Brendan!
|
| One project that I would find really interesting would be to
| leverage the insane capabilities of GPUs and 3d graphics to make
| extremely detailed visualizations of millions and billions of
| performance events, intervals, code paths, data structures, heat
| maps, and the like. It'd be great to get views beyond the raw
| data that are not oversimplified and useless, but rather to get
| the feeling of being at the helm of some seriously detailed (and
| precise!) data with zoomable resolution and a lot of assistance
| of analyzers to surface visual artifacts. I think it'd be both
| entertaining and highly productive to engage our visual cortex
| more.
| ryandotsmith wrote:
| Congrats! I've been following your career for as long as I can
| remember. You are a big inspiration and I'm excited to see what
| you do next.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I've followed a lot of Brendan's low-level talks and blogposts,
| and have always enjoyed them.
|
| Good luck at Intel! They do seem like a group that would be
| interested in the low-level optimization expertise Brendan
| clearly has!
| loki49152 wrote:
| Sun machines always seemed to have weird environment-dependent
| behavior. In college, one of our classmates got the nickname "the
| human eclipse" because no matter what time of day, no matter what
| else was going on, when he walked into the Sun lab the machines
| all went down.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I would like to know who this "hardware vendor, who were
| initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of their
| technology went poorly became bullying and misleading" was, or
| anyway wasn't.
|
| A statement that it was not AMD would be meaningful. (We all know
| Qualcomm and Broadcom have their problems.)
| zymhan wrote:
| "Hardware vendor" could also be a company like Dell or Cisco.
| It's not clear he's referencing a chip manufacturer
| eatonphil wrote:
| > The title of this post is indeed my email address (I also used
| to be Brendan@Sun.com).
|
| The blog post title is "Brendan@Intel.com." HN formatting ruined
| a little bit of the fun of the blog post. :)
| loudmax wrote:
| In the blog post, Brendan Gregg confirms that that is indeed
| his actual email address at Intel. That's actually an
| impressive recognition of Brendan's capabilities. I wonder how
| many engineers at Intel have a <firstname>@intel.com email
| address.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Does Intel not let you pick what username you want at the
| company?
| eminence32 wrote:
| At my company (of about 22k people worldwide), your
| username is derived from the first and last letters in your
| name, and numbers appended to make it unique. VIP's don't
| get to pick their username as far as I know. Intel is large
| enough that I would guess that their default naming is also
| algorithmic, but apparently some VIPs like Brendan are able
| to get nice usernames.
| jedberg wrote:
| Amazon assigns you an algorithmic name but you can
| request anything you want that isn't already taken. My
| friend got a three letter email addy within just the last
| couple of years.
| [deleted]
| saagarjha wrote:
| I know both Apple and Google let you pick your username.
| Elsewhere I've gotten generic stuff that I've created
| aliases for.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Just because you get assigned an address doesn't mean you
| can't ask for another one. :)
| technofiend wrote:
| Dude's also an Intel Fellow, which is pretty august company
| to keep.
| capableweb wrote:
| Too late by now, but "Brendan Inside" would have been an
| excellent title!
| pphysch wrote:
| Tim Apple, Brendan Intel, who next?
| addaon wrote:
| Mike Rowe Soft?
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| Uzi Nissan.
| hasmanean wrote:
| Nicholas Tesla.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Sort out the AVX-512 debacle and maybe adopt some form of the
| insanely cool vector instructions arm64 uses for a start ...
| dragontamer wrote:
| > insanely cool vector instructions arm64
|
| Which ones would those be?
|
| SVE is somewhat interesting, but I've generally found the
| AVX512 instructions more innovative. I really like AVX512's
| "compress" and "expand" instructions, for example... as well as
| the classic "vpermb" (but vector-permutation has been around
| since SSE and is an old trick: the old pshufb instruction).
|
| Since SVE doesn't want to "set" its SIMD-width, it seems like
| these permute instructions (vpermb, or even compress/expand)
| aren't possible?
|
| -------
|
| I've always enjoyed Intel's innovative new instructions: PEXT,
| PDEP, and now AVX512 compress and AVX512 expand.
|
| AVX512 also includes gather/scatter (but that's not innovative,
| been around for a long time but still nice to see it in
| prosumer systems)
| mochomocha wrote:
| Can you expand on why you find AVX512 instructions more
| innovative? I haven't had a chance to try SVE yet, but on
| paper it sounds very innovative and offers a wide range of
| new capabilities.
|
| Gather/scatter have been around for a while, but it hasn't
| been until more recent Intel uarch that their cost makes them
| worth using in practice. Zen3 is still lagging quite a bit.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I've seen real-life situations in the past 5 years (albeit
| with my personal hobby code, nothing professionally), where
| VCOMPRESSPS or VEXPANDPS would quickly and simply solve my
| problem.
|
| I personally would have never thought of making such an
| instruction, despite having written multiple sets of code
| that use a SIMD-compress or SIMD-expand pattern.
|
| -------
|
| Case in point, vpcompressb (byte-wise compress) is the most
| blatantly obvious way to "remove redundant XML whitespace"
| that I've ever seen.
|
| Its just a thing that has obvious wide-spread applicability
| to many algorithms I've seen and keeps coming up again-and-
| again. Or determining which rays (in a raytracer) are
| "dead" vs "alive" (separating out hits vs misses). Or
| implementing quicksort (compress all items "less than
| pivot" to X array. Compress all items "greater than pivot"
| to a Y array. Quicksort done).
| atq2119 wrote:
| Compress/Expand seems like a natural fit for something like
| SVE since it can still be phrased rather generically and I
| can easily see it fitting into loops that are written
| generically over vector length.
|
| Free-form permutation does indeed seem like less of a fit.
| Though it still makes sense to define a minimum vector length
| of N for the ISA and support permutation ops that apply the
| same permutation on groups of N lanes.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Completely OT:
|
| is anybody else bothered by the use of capitalization in email
| addresses? I understand that it doesn't matter semantically, but
| I find myself thinking negatively of people who use this for some
| reason.
| [deleted]
| jupp0r wrote:
| Yes, I do know that theoretically there could be different
| mailboxes on a server that do depend on capitalization, but
| this is not really happening in practice as far as I'm aware.
| niij wrote:
| The RFC specifies that the local (left of the @) is treated
| as case sensitive[0] so it can have semantic meaning.
|
| In practice many hosted mail providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc)
| treat their own accounts as case insensitive. But in MS
| Exchange, for example, you can have separate inboxes with
| only capitalization differences, so it's definitely not
| obscure.
|
| > local-part of a mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive.
| Therefore, SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve
| the case of mailbox local-parts. In particular, for some
| hosts, the user "smith" is different from the user "Smith".
|
| 0: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321#section-2.4
| jupp0r wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't know about MS Exchange. I still haven't
| seen this happen in practice (ie differently capitalized
| emails not arriving, etc).
| userbinator wrote:
| Especially when it's Intel, the company which traditionally has
| a lowercase i in its logo.
|
| Also rather OT: The Intel l219 or I219 or i219 must be one of
| the worst names ever for a NIC. Even Intel doesn't seem to know
| whether that first letter is an uppercase I or a lowercase l.
| throw0101a wrote:
| He's come a long way since yelling at hard drives in Sun's data
| centre:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
|
| * https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2008-12-31/unusual-disk-la...
| dilippkumar wrote:
| > yelling at hard drives in Sun's data centre
|
| I didn't expect this to be so... literal.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It worked too, you could replicate this easily yourself. A
| bit harder with an SSD ;)
| 0des wrote:
| Wait till you find out about "parking" your drives
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _My dream is to turn computer performance analysis into a
| science, one where we can completely understand the performance
| of everything: of applications, libraries, kernels,
| hypervisors, firmware, and hardware._
|
| Reminds me of Bret Victor's _Inventing on Principle_ (2012),
| https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/PUv66718DII
| perch56 wrote:
| Forgot about the video and didn't realize it's the same person.
| Also reminded me of this 2016 incident that happened in an ING
| data center https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37337868.amp
| teddyh wrote:
| Fire suppression systems are no joke:
|
| https://www.sanitarium.net/jokes/getjoke.cgi?183
| maxmcd wrote:
| A video posted by Bryan Cantrill no less.
| throw0101a wrote:
| At the time of the video they were working on the
| "Fishworks"+ project:
|
| * http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-
| can-...
|
| + A play on Lockheed Martin's "Skunkworks".
| capableweb wrote:
| There was some speculation in the previous thread about
| brendangregg on where they're going next
| ((https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31051662)). Not a single
| person seems to have gotten it right :)
|
| Caught me a bit by surprise as well, as Intel seems to have
| stagnated a bit as of late, but the opening paragraph seems to
| indicate Brendan thinks otherwise, and who am I to disagree.
|
| I wish you luck on the new adventures, and hope you'll have tons
| of fun!
| MikePlacid wrote:
| >Caught me a bit by surprise as well, as Intel seems to have
| stagnated a bit as of late
|
| The best place for an engineer to be (in my observation) - is
| at a company that faces a fierce competition. To envision,
| design and build a pipe pumping gold vs to exploit such a pipe
| when it is built - requires different skills.
|
| >I recently worked with another hardware vendor, who were
| initially friendly and supportive but after evaluations of
| their technology went poorly became bullying and misleading.
|
| I wonder who this is.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| A high-profile hire probably would not word it this way
| exactly... but old org that is struggling can be an interesting
| place to be. Especially if there is new leadership looking to
| right the ship and put their stamp on things.
|
| A lot of "we can't do that" or "we don't do that" in big corps
| actually comes down to "we don't think we need to do that."
| Because why mess with success?
|
| But when everyone realizes success is slipping, a lot more
| things become possible. I'm going through that now at my
| employer and big ideas that bounced off of walls for years are
| now getting done in months. It's fun.
| lukeh wrote:
| Apple circa 1997 :)
| singhrac wrote:
| While the fabs might have hit some missteps, Intel's software
| group has still been very strong for a long time. MKL and icc
| are examples of Intel putting effort into software (I can't
| remember whether they hobble it on AMD which would be a real
| shame). Still a great company and will likely be a leader
| again.
| ncmncm wrote:
| > whether they hobble it on AMD
|
| That has varied. At one point, you could set a "please don't
| sabotage performance" environment variable that made e.g.
| Matlab 2x faster. Then it started being ignored. Making
| software deliberately cripple performance to make your
| hardware look better reveals the kind of company it is.
| neogodless wrote:
| Intel has a ton of product lines, and a sort of parallel
| business of design and production, which they've started to
| split apart.
|
| Their core CPU design has managed to stay relevant (and
| profitable) despite issues with production, and has regained
| some measure of success with their 12th generation.
|
| Their production business has a good roadmap, but success in
| execution remains to be proven.
|
| GPU design is a bit of a wildcard, and I'm excited to see if it
| pans out.
|
| I would say it's fair to say that what came out of Intel
| certainly _felt_ stagnant as the past decade drug on, but there
| 's still promise that they remain competitive.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Their network business is a trainwreck now controlled
| entirely by people who don't know product or networking
| customers.
| alimov wrote:
| Hadn't heard of BPF prior to today. Anyone have experience
| working with BPF? Has the recent (past 3 or so years) interest in
| BPF had a big impact?
| kubatyszko wrote:
| Coincidence with Netflix resignations and/or layoffs ?
| subsubzero wrote:
| Huge, huge fan of Brendan's work, "Systems Performance" is one of
| the few technical books I've read cover to cover twice! That
| being said I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock
| price cratering, the timing does seem suspicious :)
| jedberg wrote:
| No he didn't. He announced his departure the day before the
| stock cratered (some jokingly blamed the drop on his
| announcement).
| progbits wrote:
| As a person known for performance work there is no way he
| wasn't looking at various performance and usage charts and
| didn't know well ahead of the earnings call that their
| numbers are not looking good and stock will fall.
|
| Not saying the decision was caused by this. But he for sure
| is the "insider" that "insider trading" talks about.
| jedberg wrote:
| As a former insider myself, I can say that it was pretty
| hard to divine the earnings report from service metrics. We
| could see over-all patterns of ups or downs, but Wall
| Street mostly reacts to the future estimations as well as
| profitability, neither of which we could derive from
| metrics. And while we had access to active subscriber
| numbers, again how Wall Street reacted to a miss or not was
| not always predictable.
|
| Or in short, I doubt he could see this coming, especially
| given that his interview process had to start a few months
| ago.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > I wonder if why he left netflix was due to its stock price
| cratering
|
| My understanding (backed up by levels.fyi) is that RSUs make up
| a negligible part of Netflix total comp. The deal I always
| heard when talking with recruiters there was that base salary
| was very high ($500k) but they were pretty aggressive about
| maintaining a churn in their employees.
|
| But I never ended up accepting an offer there and it was awhile
| ago so hopefully some other Netflix employees can confirm
| whether or not RSUs are a major part of comp today.
| subsubzero wrote:
| yeah it is curious, I know they used to have a $400-$500k
| chunk for total comp(every engineer was Sr+) and you picked
| what % you want towards salary vs. RSU's. This was a few
| years back so I think they may have gone the route you
| mentioned which is mostly all cash.
| jedberg wrote:
| Netflix doesn't do RSUs at all, they do options. You get a
| comp number, which is all cash. Then you choose, once a year,
| how much of that cash you want to use to buy options. The
| option discount changes occasionally, as well as the percent
| of your salary you can use to buy them. The options are 10
| year options.
|
| When I was there the option was 20% of the stock price and
| you could do 100% in stock if you wanted to. So if the stock
| was $100 a share I'd pay $20 for the option to buy a share at
| $100 for the next 10 years. In other words, I was break even
| if the stock went up 20%, and doubled my money if it went up
| 40%. It was a great program when the stock was growing more
| than 20% a year.
|
| From what I understand most people take all cash now, or
| nearly all.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| Does the Netflix earning decline have anything to do with his
| departure? The timeline seems to match up.
| jedberg wrote:
| He announced the day the stock dropped, so no, he was already
| out before that.
| trishume wrote:
| I really hope he can work with cloud vendors and Intel to make
| Processor Trace a more popular and easier to use capability.
|
| It's unfortunate how https://github.com/janestreet/magic-trace
| and PMUs in general can't be used by lots of people using cloud
| VMs.
| brendangregg wrote:
| Yes, getting PMCs enabled in VMs was just the start, I think
| the next hardware capabilities to enable are: -
| PEBS (Precise/Processor event based sampling, so that we can
| accurately get instruction pointers on PMC events) -
| uncore PMCs (in a safe manner) - LBR (last branch record,
| to aid stack walking) - BTS (branch trace store, " ")
| - Processor trace (for cycle traces)
|
| Processor trace may be the final boss. We've got through level
| 1, PMCs, now onto PEBS and beyond.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| One question: are you hiring?
| runjake wrote:
| Right. That's all good, but the important question is: what
| will your desk look like at Intel?[1]
|
| 1. Meta:
| https://twitter.com/brendangregg/status/1515482126871044098
| mhh__ wrote:
| Can this be safely/efficiently virtualized? I love using
| these tools but post-spectre I could understand people being
| hesitant to expose more internal "state" (I.e. Technically
| unique to a VM but only one processor bug away from kaboom?).
|
| Congrats on the job.
| dragontamer wrote:
| On AMD systems, many hardware performance counters are
| locked behind BIOS flags/configuration.
|
| I admit that I don't know how Intel works, but disabling
| the use of these performance-counters at startup should be
| sufficient for any potential security problem.
|
| I'd expect that only development boxes (maybe staging?)
| would be interested in performance counters anyway. Maybe
| the occasional development box could be setup for
| performance-sampling and collecting these counters, but not
| all production boxes need to be run with performance-
| counters on.
| mhh__ wrote:
| No I want these performance counters everywhere.
| Obviously I know they can be disabled but that doesn't
| really help.
|
| I also really want them in CI but that might be a long
| way away.
| dman wrote:
| Being able to collect performance data from production
| boxes is invaluable.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, getting LBR data from production workloads is the
| whole ballgame for AutoFDO/SamplePGO and BOLT/Propeller.
| You cannot access the LBR on any EC2 machine short of a
| "metal" instance.
| mhh__ wrote:
| When it comes to PGO (vs. profiling the whole system)
| though it's worth noting that a lot of the speedup comes
| from things which are too trivial for us humans to
| consider.
|
| When I profiled the D compiler with and without PGO
| enabled it became obvious that a lot of the speedup of
| PGO basically comes just from running the program, the
| choice of testcases made almost no difference.
| [deleted]
| aseipp wrote:
| > not all production boxes need to be run with
| performance-counters on.
|
| Production is _exactly_ the place where you want full
| performance counter support, all the time, everywhere, on
| every machine.
| brendangregg wrote:
| Thanks! We have to work through each capability carefully.
| Some won't be safe, and will be available on bare-metal
| instances only. That may be ok, as it fits with the
| following evolution of an application (this is something I
| did for some recent talks): 1. FaaS
| 2. Containers 3. Lightweight VMs (e.g., Firecracker)
| 4. Bare-metal instances
|
| As (and if) an application grows, it migrates to platforms
| with greater performance and observability.
|
| The ship has sailed on neighbor detection BTW. There's so
| many ways to know you're a VM with neighbors that disabling
| PMCs for that reason alone doesn't make sense.
| cperciva wrote:
| _The ship has sailed on neighbor detection BTW._
|
| In the crudest sense of "do I have a neighbour", sure. Of
| course, that's hardly secret -- if you're in EC2 you can
| just count your CPUs to figure that out.
|
| But there's more questions you can ask:
|
| 1. Is my neighbour busy right now?
|
| 2. Is my neighbour a busy web server, a busy database, or
| a busy application server?
|
| 3. Is my neighbour hosting Brendan's website?
|
| 4. Is my neighbour hosting Brendan's website and he's
| logged in writing a blog post in vi right now?
|
| 5. What's Brendan writing right now?
|
| It's not immediately clear which of these questions can
| be answered using certain capabilities! Few people would
| have guessed that you could read text off someone's
| screen using hyperthreading prior to 2005, for example.
| (Pretty simple although I don't know if anyone has
| published exploit code for it: Just look at which cache
| lines are fetched fetching glyphs to render to the
| screen.)
| tedd4u wrote:
| Was hoping he would end up somewhere working on accelerating ARM
| in cloud platforms. But Intel is good, too :D
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Didn't know Intel has a dev cloud till now!
| alberth wrote:
| Clear Linux.
|
| I wonder if Brendan will directly contribute to Clear Linux. It's
| already the fastest Linux distro by many benchmarks. His software
| contribution to a distro that is focused on Intel proc would be
| really interesting.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| > One interviewer who had studied my work asked "How many staff
| report to you?" "None." He kept returning to this question. I got
| the feeling that he didn't actually believe it, and thought if he
| asked enough times I'd confess to having a team.
|
| My experience with this in interview loops is that it's less
| about admiring a persons technical abilities, but more a checkbox
| question to determine whether a person fits into a certain role
| model that companies have set up. At most FAANGs, interviews will
| expect that you mention you are being the tech lead of a team
| (5-10 engineers) at a (L|E)6 role, even if one isn't a manager.
| At (L|E)7, it will be 50+ engineers. As a regular engineer, one
| would probably have an issue getting hired at a high seniority
| level without answering the question the right way. Things might
| be different for well-known personalities like Brendan.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| Had this experience - worked in a role where I was mostly a
| very senior IC but also managed a small team for strategic
| projects. Interviewed at FAANG and got convinced that
| corresponded to an L6 sort of role, definitely should have held
| out for L7 though.
|
| Walk in the door to find that move of the L7s I've encountered
| have been leading 50 person teams (as manager or TL). Seems to
| range from more like 20-35 and, among ICs, there often not
| actually the only TL, just the most senior on the team.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My team has hundreds of people, but a core team of about ~20
| does most of cool stuff. It's kind of a unique role.
|
| On interviews it sucks. The engineers assume I'm some jackass
| manager guy, and the manager guy thinks I'm in the weeds.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| At the distinguished engineer level, you can get away with not
| being a tech lead. But ya, you'll have problems if you go from
| a very individual IC to a FAANG where they expect more
| leadership to have been demonstrated.
| eikenberry wrote:
| This is a problem in many FAANG like companies. They have no
| real technical track for "individual contributors"... all
| paths turn into management roles eventually. Sucks that when
| companies finally got on board with technical tracks that
| didn't require switching to management they just did it by
| making the senior technical spots management spots. So still
| no real technical tracks.
| ab_testing wrote:
| > This is a problem in many FAANG like companies.
|
| I think this is a problem in all companies in general.
| slongfield wrote:
| A tech lead role is different from a management role.
|
| The TL is the person who the buck stops with on technical
| discussions. While part of the job is providing mentoring
| for junior engineers, they aren't directly responsible for
| performance management, headcount allocation, etc, in the
| same way that a people manager is, and people don't usually
| directly report to them in the org chart.
|
| By definition, no large engineering effort is solitary. It
| makes sense for the more senior eng to be responsible for
| the decisions that will affect more people, and that
| requires talking to and understanding them. If people want
| the senior eng title, they need to be able to do that kind
| of work.
| closeparen wrote:
| A large engineering org is almost always horizontal,
| whereas some narrow problems are unusually deep and/or
| important and therefore benefit from unusually skilled
| attention down to the micro level.
|
| In some cases you want your three wizards supervising the
| architecture of 100 people working on 25 products... and
| sometimes you want them lovingly crafting every line of a
| framework or other core component that is going to
| mechanically influence all that work even more than
| design review ever could.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > The geeks are back with Pat Gelsinger and Greg Lavender as the
| CEO and CTO;
|
| This is something I am so excited to hear about Intel. As a
| consumer and user, I want Intel/Apple/AMD/NVidia all to be
| competitive and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in
| computing.
|
| So far Apple has done an amazing job with M1. AMD has had super
| success with Ryzen. Nvidia has had great success with GPUs.
|
| Recently, it seemed Intel was lagging, in large part due to their
| culture. It is exciting to see them get some "geeks" back in
| charge.
|
| It is an exciting time in computing!
| pavlov wrote:
| This! And I'd also add Qualcomm to the list of CPU companies
| that I hope to succeed.
|
| Qualcomm is designing desktop-level ARM chips to compete with
| Apple's M series. The team came from Apple via a startup
| acquisition (Nuvia). Will be interesting to see how that turns
| out.
| dboreham wrote:
| Exciting for me because I worked with Greg Lavender long ago
| and had totally missed his rise to ultimate power!
| User23 wrote:
| I strongly agree. It's my belief that companies whose
| management team has direct operational experience will long
| term outperform the ones run by bean counters. I'm very bullish
| on Intel's future!
| natly wrote:
| This guy left netflix at an incredibly lucky timing (wrt the
| stock price)
| mkhnews wrote:
| Maybe the stock drop was because he left ;-)
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| My thought as well :-)
| nicce wrote:
| Netflix is an incredibly profitable company still. Investment
| world is really a messed place, when infinite growth is
| expected from public companies.
| kolbe wrote:
| For Netflix, I think the expectation used to be that they
| would establish themselves as a long-lasting company that
| would generate $20bn in profit per year. It's now looking
| dubious that they will exist in a meaningful way in a decade
| --that their value is now to milk the subscribers they have
| for all they're worth until they have no more.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Of the big tech companies, Netflix has the smallest most.
|
| Google has search.
|
| Apple has the iPhone.
|
| Microsoft has Windows and Office.
|
| Amazon has AWS and logistics.
|
| All of these are huge competitive moats.
|
| However, unlike when Netflix first started, the moat for
| streaming is not the tech it is the content. As such, Disney,
| Universal, etc which have decades worth of movies/shows have
| a huge advantage in this new reality where streaming can be
| implemented relatively easily.
| conjecTech wrote:
| Netflix's moat is the marginal unit economics of media. At
| present, they have twice the number of subscribers of the
| nearest competitor(Disney), and that ratio is probably far
| higher in non-US markets. They can outbid everyone for
| content and still deliver a service at a lower COGS than
| anyone else in the market. They still have to produce a
| high volume of good content, but it allows them far more
| mistakes in doing so. It also allows them to make content
| tailored to niches which aren't economic for others.
| gonzo wrote:
| With its resources, Disney can certainly match any bid by
| Netflix.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure.
|
| Looking at the current market capitalization of both
| companies, Netflix is at 84.57 billion and Disney at
| 203.Billion.
|
| The difference, however, is Netflix could hone squarely
| in content if it needed to, and can benefit from having a
| single focus of mind. Disney's resources are allocated
| into 5 primary verticals, and 2 subsidiaries, with
| multiple competing budgets, priorities, resource
| allocations, and most debilitating at a company their
| size, internal politics.
|
| That being said, Disney already funds so much of their
| own content generation, so the question isn't can Disney
| match a bid by Netflix (that's already a losing question
| for Disney), but can Disney create competing content that
| is more compelling.
| autoexec wrote:
| > They can outbid everyone for content
|
| the problem netflix faces is that more and more content
| won't be offered to netflix at any price since it'll be
| produced explicitly for other streaming services. If
| everyone has their own streaming services competing with
| netflix then eventually netflix is left with almost
| nothing but the content netflix itself produces.
| est31 wrote:
| > they have twice the number of subscribers of the
| nearest competitor(Disney)
|
| And Disney had 60% subscriber growth in the past year
| (74M Q4 2020, 118M Q4 2021), while Netflix had 9% growth
| in the past year (203M Q4 2020, 222M Q4 2021), meaning
| the distance is shrinking as we speak. Disney sits on a
| massive portfolio of content, especially compared to
| Netflix. They are the bigger company, and have
| infrastructure to sell the content they own via multiple
| ways instead of just streaming.
| conjecTech wrote:
| Upvoted your comment for a solid counter argument.
| Disney's growth is decelerating as well. If you measure
| from Q1 2021 to Q1 2022, growth was down to 37%. I do
| think they're a very viable competitor, but I don't think
| the two businesses are mutually exclusive at current
| ARPU.
|
| The reliance on theatrical releases is a bit of a mixed
| bag. It is another mechanism for content generation that
| can add to their library, but it also comes at a loss of
| some value to users of Disney+ if they care about seeing
| stuff on release. Additionally, it's dependent on a
| distribution channel(cinemas) that is currently
| hemorrhaging money. If moviegoing doesn't recover to pre-
| pandemic levels before the apes' money runs out, it might
| prove to be a vulnerability.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Well, we know that Brendan Gregg left Netflix and then the
| stock crashed. So maybe Intel should make sure they can hold
| onto him.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Would he have been forced to sell his shares upon leaving? He
| could very will still have shares there. Why would he
| necessarily have avoided the dip?
| nosequel wrote:
| Why would he be forced to sell his shares upon leaving?
| That's not how anything works. You can have options that you
| lose, RSUs as well (but Netflix doesn't have RSUs), but a
| public company can't force you to sell your shares.
| [deleted]
| nixgeek wrote:
| Netflix pays cash to its employees. If you opt-in to the Stock
| Option Plan that's your choice (one thing I love about Netflix
| - you can Google all of this!).
| rektide wrote:
| This tale of super talented engineers having no one under them,
| being individual contributors, feels too common. Im sure Netflix
| had some idea how valuable, how much money Brendan was
| saving/making them, but I still would not be surprised to hear
| organization impedance was sometimes an issue.
| [deleted]
| gotaquestion wrote:
| It is impossible to remain an individual contributor at Intel.
| This will last about a year. There are simply too many
| employees to maintain a flat hierarchy. People dream of this,
| but in reality, if you're really that good, you will absolutely
| become a manager, there's just not enough hands on deck.
|
| Plus there is also social pressure: while you're cavorting
| about as an individual contributor, many other peers will be
| crushed under management pressure, and will start to resent
| you, and demand to the VPs that you share the load.
|
| That being said, Intel is really taking a hard turn back to
| engineering. I might even consider going back there, assuming
| Gelsinger doesn't go back to the old school ranking-and-ratings
| that forces you up or out, or the "you must give 120%"
| bullshit. Being forced to work in "dungeon mode" for months at
| a time is what drove me out. "Dungeon mode" is supposed to be a
| 1-2 week thing to fix a serious bug. (DM is spending 14 hours a
| day in a conference room 7 days a week.) YOu can only do that
| so many years in a row before saying enough. That's why Intel
| lost so many people to Apple a few years ago.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| >(DM is spending 14 hours a day in a conference room 7 days a
| week.) YOu can only do that so many years in a row before
| saying enough. That's why Intel lost so many people to Apple
| a few years ago.
|
| I refuse to believe that people went from Intel to Apple for
| quality of life improvements
| lallysingh wrote:
| Less abuse is still better than more abuse?
| gotaquestion wrote:
| There are many sides to apple. The CPU architecture side is
| not the same as software, cloud, or products/apps, it is
| run very differently. It's almost a different company. The
| architects and designers I know left because they were
| tired of Intel forcing crazy product roadmap twists and
| turns, and demands on their time, seemingly going nowhere.
| Apple's Mx silicon has been a smashing success, quite a
| change from Intel's architectural constipation and chain-
| yanking of their engineers. Most employees at Intel are
| pigeonholed, and it is rare that an opportunity to break
| out without having to move cities occurs, and many took it.
| pstuart wrote:
| Per the recent story about Jony Ive burning out at Apple I
| wonder how well Brendan will be protected from the miasma of
| managing a staff in a highly political environment.
|
| I'd think a smart move would be to hire a personnel manager
| for him to deal with _all_ administrivia and let him focus on
| leveraging his talents with other like minds.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Just keep heaping on the responsibility if they don't get
| burned out. Let's put these people to work. Better than me
| having to get off my ass.
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